Polar Geopolitics

Camp Century, a 1960s US Army base embedded in the Greenland ice sheet, was not only a High Arctic test site for advanced technologies—including a modular nuclear reactor—and secret military schemes at the height of the Cold War, but also a seminal location for the extraction of ice cores that would become an important baseline for modern climate science. Associate professor Kristian H. Nielsen of Aarhus University, who-coauthored a definitive account of this fascinating chapter of Cold War history, “Camp Century: The Untold Story of America's Secret Arctic Military Base Under the Greenland Ice” (Columbia University Press, 2021), joins the podcast to discuss this audacious geostrategic initiative and its enduring afterlife that has continued to complicate Denmark-US-Greenland relations for over 60 years.